The Engaged UniversityNorthern Kentucky University is building closer links to its community

Fall 2008

By Jon MarcusHighland Heights, Kentucky

The Introductions have
been made, the speeches finished,
the endless litany of benefactors
thanked when the blast of an unseen and
unmuffled engine suddenly revs to life,
shaking the arena and the polite crowd
gathered in it with an ear-blasting,
methanol-fueled roar.

James Votruba smiles. “It’s the faculty
senate,” he jokes.

Nothing could ruin this day. Wielding a
giant pair of scissors, Votruba is about to
cut the ceremonial ribbon on the new $69
million, 10,000-seat Bank of Kentucky Center at Northern Kentucky University,
where he is the president. In addition to
the university’s NCAA Division II men’s
and women’s basketball teams, the arena
is designed to host events including Cirque
du Soleil, performers such as Carrie
Underwood, and the Monster Truck Tour
(which accounts for the interruption from
the monster truck concealed from the
audience behind a curtain).

The week before, Votruba had presided
at the opening of a sleek new $37
million student union with a Starbucks, a
sushi bar and plasma-screen TVs. They
show, in continuous loops, the progress of
the nearly $300 million worth of building
projects on his campus, which, just 40
years before that, was a farm where cows
grazed on 400 acres of empty, rolling fields
seven miles southeast of Cincinnati.

The youngest of Kentucky’s eight state
universities, NKU began as a community
college that didn’t formally become a university
until 1976, but has since seen
growth that seems methanol fueled itself,
racing to an enrollment of 15,000—up 50
percent in just the last ten years. And it
plans to add about as many undergraduates
in the next 12 years as it did in its first
25, toward a goal of 26,000 by 2020.

President James Votruba of Northern
Kentucky University has vigorously
promoted ties between the university
and the surrounding region.(Photo by Robin Nelson, Black Star, for CrossTalk)

What has put this once-provincial campus on the higher education map is its
seemingly single-minded push to improve
the lot of its surrounding region. It’s not
some vague pledge. (Nor is it purely altruistic;
if the public university helps the community,
this perfectly reasonable strategy
goes, the community will stand behind it.)
A lynchpin of a regional development
plan Votruba and others at the school
coauthored, NKU has promised to help
create some 50,000 new, high-paying jobs
by 2015 and also help to double the number of Kentuckians with bachelor’s
degrees to 800,000, as a means of supplanting
the state’s traditional economic
mainstays of coal-mining, horse-breeding,
bourbon and tobacco, with advanced manufacturing,
finance, healthcare, business services, and technology. That’s the reason
for the push to boost enrollment—and the
attraction, it seems, for rising numbers of
arriving students.

To make the area more economically
competitive, the university has taken on
uncommon and audacious roles, beginning
not with entering freshmen, but with
elementary-school children; training local
teachers in such areas as math and science;
recruiting high-performing high school
graduates to attend the university; nudging
its own students toward programs that
meet the needs of local business—information,
finance, science and technology,
healthcare and social services; and working
to attract bachelor’s degree holders
from other states by beefing up its graduate-
level offerings and enrollment, in a
“brain-gain” strategy meant to reverse
Kentucky’s brain drain by attracting some
8,600 college graduates from outside the
region by 2020.

Lots of taxpayer-supported universities
mumble about contributing to economic
development but don’t follow through—a
survey of American Association of State
Colleges and Universities presidents and
chancellors found that fewer than half
believe their schools are closely linked to
their communities. But NKU is making a
name for itself by adding programs in such
eminently practical disciplines as entrepreneurship
and information technology
management, opening a Center for Civic
Engagement, even making faculty hiring,
tenure and promotion contingent on community
service along with teaching and
research.

“Regions that make talent a central
priority are anchored by high-performing
universities that not only nurture talent in
their classrooms and laboratories but also
apply their knowledge to advance regional
economic and social progress,” asserts the
school’s strategic plan, which was the subject
of a case study at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. “They are
stewards of their regions.”

NKU was singled out by George W.
Bush as an example of how public universities
can be partners in economic competitiveness
with businesses and civic institutions.
It was one of 13 universities that
helped the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching to devise a voluntary higher education classification of
“community engaged,” and was one of 76
institutions ultimately granted that distinction.

Noting that its new arena “testifies to
the university’s growing prominence in the
economy of this region,” the Cincinnati
Enquirer lauded NKU as a major local
asset—this at a time when many other universities
have yet to lower the fences that
divide them from their neighborhoods.
Votruba chaired an AASCU task force on
public engagement (it found, among other
things, that most universities were more
concerned with adding programs, faculty,
and buildings than contributing to local
social or economic well being) and delivered
the annual AASCU President-to-
Presidents lecture on the topic, “Leading
the Engaged University.” He has been
nicknamed “the mayor of Northern
Kentucky” and was ranked the region’s
eighth most influential person by
Cincinnati Magazine.

Northern Kentucky seems a fertile
place for such collaboration. Mediumsized
metropolitan areas like greater
Cincinnati are attractive to business, with
low costs of living (Cincinnati’s is fully ten
percent below the national average, and
its housing prices 20 percent below), and
with services employers need, including
law firms and advertising agencies—without
the unions and big-city social problems
businesses don’t want. Cincinnati is
already home to major companies, including
Procter & Gamble, May Department
Stores, and Fidelity
Investments’ largest branch outside
its Boston headquarters. Its
new football and baseball stadiums
for the Bengals and the
Reds huddle up to the Ohio
River, which divides Ohio from
Kentucky. The area also has
creditable cultural activities, and
boasts a less-than-24-minute
average commute, one of the
fastest in the country—an odd
thing to promote, it seems, until
you experience the unaccustomed
bliss of coasting through a
weekday rush hour without ever
stepping on the brakes.

There are also significant
challenges. The percentage of
people with bachelor’s degrees in
northern Kentucky is as low as
ten percent in the western fringes
of the university’s service area,
far short of the national average
of 27 percent. In some districts,
the high school graduation rate
sags below 62 percent. Per-capita
income is $28,513, putting
Kentucky 43rd among the 50 states. The
population is aging, as 25- to 34-year-olds
move away in search of higher-paying
jobs. Rural Kentucky remains largely agricultural,
and what industry does exist is
singularly vulnerable to larger economic
shifts. Kentucky is fourth in the United
States in the number of cars and trucks
assembled, for example, and also makes
car parts and jet engines, at a time when
demand for those things is drying up.

The story of NKU is a cautionary tale
in other ways, too. The university’s community-
engagement crusade has stumbled
against impediments both practical and
cultural. For one thing, setting goals risks
falling short of them when resources fail to
keep pace, as they did here even before the
current economic crisis. Kentucky’s
higher education system
got a surge of cash when it was
overhauled under the groundbreaking
Postsecondary Improvement
Act of 1997, more commonly
called House Bill 1, the goal of
which was to increase enrollment
and improve standards.

But budget shortfalls threaten
to erode any gains. The state allocation
for public universities had
already been cut by $23 million
last year when it was learned it
would be slashed by $41 million
more. Now state tax revenue is
projected to decline by yet another
$900 million this year and next,
out of a budget of $20 billion. The
governor already has proposed
reducing higher education funding
by another 12 percent, putting
even more of the burden on
tuition, which now accounts for
nearly two-thirds of NKU’s operating
budget, and has been rising
steeply.

Sue Hodges Moore, Northern Kentucky University vice president for planning,
policy and budget, and Gail W. Weils, vice president for academic affairs, say the
university cannot suffer more budget cuts and still play a key role in regional
economic development.(Photo by Chris Cone, Black Star, for CrossTalk)

Raising tuition, of course,
makes it harder to increase enrollment.
The regional economic
plan, Vision 2015, calls for 4,005
graduates per year to be produced by
NKU and other local colleges and universities.
The state’s Council on Postsecondary
Education has an even more
ambitious target of 3,149 graduates per
year by 2020 from NKU alone, which now
produces 1,624. That would require an
average annual enrollment growth of five
percent, and an increase in the budget
from the current $186 million a year to
$571 million by 2020. It also means adding
460 tenure-track faculty and a million
more square feet of space.

NKU has begun to warn that if the
budget cuts continue, it will have to readjust,
or at least push back, its enrollment
targets. And with seven years to go, the
closest answer anyone will give to the
question of how many jobs have been created
toward that goal of 50,000 is 2,540, an
estimate made by the Northern Kentucky
Tri-County Economic Development Corporation.
“If we ask ourselves whether the
campus is positioned to provide what both
the state and the region require of us, the
honest answer is no,” Votruba said last
year in a somber state-of-the-university
address.

NKU has publicly forged a united
front with its fellow public universities to
make a case for holding firm on funding,
but there is growing friction as they all vie
for the same finite resources. The wellconnected
flagship University of Kentucky
has an ambitious plan itself, to become a
top-20 public research university by 2020,
by increasing enrollment, hiring new faculty,
and increasing research spending. This
would require an annual budget reaching
$1 billion, $421 million of which would be
requested from the already stretched state
general assembly.

Meanwhile, despite the attempt of
House Bill 1 to foil costly duplication by
giving each state university an explicit mission
(the University of Louisville’s, for
example, is urban research), the universities
have their own ideas. The University
of Louisville angered frustrated legislators
by planning a research center in rural
health, and Western Kentucky University
asked for a saltwater shrimp biotechnology
program, even though Kentucky State
already has a freshwater shrimp production
center, and Western Kentucky
University is 727 miles from the nearest
ocean. Meanwhile, other areas, like
Austin and Charlotte, threaten to surpass
Kentucky with their own ascendant university-
community alliances, to the frustration
of Votruba. “The risk is that we lose
momentum and become like everyone
else,” he said, gazing at the Cincinnati skyline
through the windows of his office.

And everyone else seems busy hoarding
what they have. Universities often
measure their success by how many programs
they can add—how many buildings
they can build, how much grant money
they can get—all to build up their prestige,
Votruba said. Yet, from their beginnings,
public universities “were never meant to
be ends in themselves. They were seen as
vehicles to achieve a larger end, an important
partner in nation-building, or, more to
the point, in region-building. As any
industry matures, it runs the risk of losing
touch with the constituency it serves,”
Votruba explained, citing the American
auto industry as an example. “I think that
has happened with higher education.”

Have faculty been universally enthusiastic
about community service? “The
answer to that is unequivocally no,” said
Dale Elifrits, a veteran professor and
NKU’s director of pre-engineering and
outreach. Even there, he said, some faculty
just won’t do it—even though the university
has made “public engagement” a
condition of hiring, tenure and promotion.
Votruba’s quip about the faculty senate
notwithstanding, Elifrits said, “We have
our group of faculty members who we
know, no matter what we call and ask for,
if they have time, they’ll do it. And we
know who we shouldn’t even bother calling.
The fundamental drive by universities
to require or encourage faculty to publish
and get outside research money is all-consuming.”
As for himself, Elifrits said, “My
own view of a faculty member is you have
a responsibility to the public to expand the
body of knowledge, which includes reaching
out to your community and helping to
improve their lives and their productivity.”
He urges his colleagues, “Please, open up
your ears and your eyes to the world that’s
out there and how you fit into it.”

While, as Votruba puts it, other universities
and many faculty are doing things
the way they always have, NKU has found
it slightly easier to do things differently.
For one thing, while research is conducted
there, it is not primarily a research university
like those at which Votruba spent his
earlier career (Michigan State and SUNY
Binghamton). And NKU is such a relatively
young school that there is less deeprooted
tradition to overcome. The first
group of faculty members arrived to find
one building in a field of mud. They held
dual jobs (the registrar also was a chemistry
professor), and even planted a community
garden. “A lot of universities are
trying to move to this community-engagement
idea without having had a history of
it,” said Gail Weils, the provost. “It’s in our
DNA.”

The university’s Center for Integrative
Science and Math helps to train math and
science teachers. Faculty and students
from the music and theater departments
teach and perform in local schools. In conjunction
with the University of Cincinnati,
NKU counsels low-income urban high
school students to consider going on to
college, and gives full scholarships to any
qualified graduate from schools in two
border cities where about a fifth of families
live below the poverty line. This year it
began a Ph.D. program that focuses on
educational leadership, its first doctorate
outside of law.

All of these things stem directly from
Vision 2015, the regional development
blueprint whose steering committee
Votruba co-chaired and which he calls “a
textbook example of how a university can
graft itself onto an economic-planning
process.” Vision 2015 is aimed at trying to
stop young talent from leaving, by adding
high-paying jobs and improving quality of
life with parks and green space, better
schools, walkable business districts, even
free wi-fi in the airport. And, in a region
that is homogeneously white and Catholic,
Vision 2015 seeks to produce the kind of
racial and ethnic diversity employers want.
(NKU has pushed for this last goal by,
among other things, granting domestic
partner benefits to unmarried employees,
and by sponsoring public discussions of
such controversial issues as evolution in a
Bible Belt state that is home to America’s
only “museum of creationism.”)

“One barrier to progress in a community
is if it’s insular,” said Mike Hammons,
Vision 2015’s president, whose office overlooks
the Ohio River from the Kentucky
side. “It’s helpful when a university takes
the lead in establishing policies that are
tolerant and welcoming.”

NKU has done things on its campus,
too, that dovetail with the economic
growth plan. In only its eighth year, the
university’s Fifth Third Bank Entrepreneurship
Institute is ranked among the
top 25 undergraduate programs for entrepreneurs
by Entrepreneur magazine, and
has been lauded by the Princeton Review
for the applied nature of the classes. The
Infrastructure Management Institute
researches management techniques in
information technology. The university
lured Douglas Perry, a cell biologist who
helped create the nation’s first entirely
new school of informatics at Indiana
University, to be founding dean of its own
new College of Informatics, which encompasses
information management, communication
and media, computer science,
information technology, and other fields
important to the kinds of businesses northern
Kentucky is trying to attract. All of the
first 235 graduates got jobs, with average
annual starting salaries above $50,000.

Word of this is getting out. Since 2005,
the number of freshman applicants has
jumped 22 percent in spite of higher
tuition and heightened entrance requirements,
at a school whose previous openenrollment
policy earned it the nickname
“No Knowledge University,” and whose
most famous alumnus is actor George
Clooney, who studied journalism before
he dropped out. Forty percent of students
are the first in their families to go to college.
“We visited a lot of schools where
nothing was happening,” said freshman
Michael Mann, who chose NKU over the
University of Kentucky. “Here they’re
really doing things.”

While more than four out of five NKU
students are commuters, more, like Mann,
are living in new dorms or sticking around
between classes in the new student union.
Students sipping Starbucks lattes browse
brochures on tables set up by recruiters for
FedEx and Procter & Gamble. “I see tons
of people just walking around,” said Keith
Wilson, a senior and opinion editor of the
student newspaper, the Northerner.
“When I first came here, people just didn’t
hang out.” Amanda Neace, a junior and
the paper’s co-editor in chief, added,
“People who came here
like me just a few years
ago wouldn’t believe how
much this place has
changed.”

Now the question is
whether that momentum
can continue. The university
is trying to offset its
continuing budget hits by
finding new ways to save
money—and to make it.
Despite the $3.3 million
cut in its $55 million state
allocation this year, it
shuffled the budget
enough to pay for 61 new
full-time and 116 parttime
faculty. It plans to
earn a profit from the
Bank of Kentucky Center,
and to add a moneymaking
$30 million hotel,
retail, restaurant and
office complex at the
entrance to the campus. It
built the student center
with the proceeds of a fee
that students levied on
themselves (in a poll by
the Northerner, 83 percent
said they considered it a
good investment), saved
$20 million that was to have been spent on
a new dorm by converting a nearby former
nursing home instead, and opted to
forgo moving to NCAA Division I, which
would have required $25 million in facility
improvements. (Western Kentucky
University had to increase student fees by
$70 a semester to pay for doubling its football
budget, and spent $49 million on its
stadium when it moved from Division
IAA to Division IA.)

NKU also has eliminated majors such
as aviation management, and though local
economic-development types are pushing
for an expensive engineering major, it so
far has not added one, teaming up instead
to run dual engineering programs with the
universities of Kentucky, Louisville and
Cincinnati.

Even all of that might not be enough
maintain momentum. “The reallocation
was our attempt to say, ‘What can we do
to keep on track?’” said Sue Hodges
Moore, vice president for planning, policy
and budget. “But that cannot go on forever.
Something’s got to give.”

Or, say university officials, the community
will have to stand up for the university
the way they say the university has stood
up for the community. “It’s not all about
the institution. It’s about what the state
needs and what this region needs,” Moore
said. Now comes the biggest test of his
community-engagement strategy, Votruba
said. “The more tangible benefits they see
accruing to them, their families, their communities,
their lives, the more likely people
should be to support us at budget time,
at advocacy time,” he said.

Hammons, the Visions 2015 president,
is a believer. “We were the last regional
university established in Kentucky, and in
a sense we accepted that,” he said.
“Whatever we got, we felt we were lucky
to get it. But about ten years ago that
changed. We became a whole lot more
aggressive, and we spoke as a community.
And it’s really important for the state to
keep focused not on how we can cut the
pie more, but how we can increase the
pie.”

Back at the ribbon-cutting for the
Bank of Kentucky Center, which is connected
to the rest of the campus by a
pedestrian bridge, Votruba wields his giant
scissors again and again with various
groups of political and financial backers.
“Last night, I got served a little bit too
much of that poison, baby,” Carrie
Underwood’s voice croons from the
speakers. “Last night, I did things I’m not
proud of/And I got a little crazy.” The concessions
are in full operation, and there
are cheerleaders and an a capella group to
sing the national anthem. The air is thick
with optimism.

“We need more Kentuckians to go to
college. We need more Kentuckians to finish
college if we’re going to thrive as a
community and as a region,” Votruba says
to the assembled. “Tens of thousands of
visitors will come here each year. And
they’ll see this bridge as a bridge to their
future.”

Jon Marcus is a writer based in Boston,
who covers higher education in the U.S.
for the (U.K.) Times Higher Education
magazine.

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